Thirtieth International Conference on Learning

Abstract

Our visions of the future define what we do in the present and redefine what we did in the past. Despite all the hype, tech evangelism, and moral panic currently surrounding the cultural and ideological insertion of agents based on Large Language Models – such as GPT4, Bard, PaLMe etc. – as sparks of an artificial general intelligence in the making, perhaps we should spend less energy in the poorly informed discussion about the advantages and risks of the instrumental use of these sociotechnical agents, in linguistic and literacy education, than in informing educational (linguistic) pedagogies and policies aimed at a critical review of certain liberal humanist foundations that leave our present educational context unprepared to deal with the ultra and transhumanist visions of the future embedded in the onto-epistemology of connectionist AI. I propose a discussion on critical literacies of Artificial Intelligence starting from the metaphor of AI as an identity/alterity criterion of the human in the present and the future.